Hello, and welcome to libh2o | Hacker News Reader

Hello, and welcome to libh2o

powerdns.org

47 pointsfanf220 comments

I want to find the guy who wrote this documentation :

"H2O is a powerful web server used and developed by Fastly" - Ok.

"H2O is a new generation HTTP server that provides quicker response to users with less CPU utilization when compared to older generation of web servers" - Great

This is where it becomes cringy : "H2O as a web server is very impressive and is seeing more and more use"

"I have used more web server frameworks than is reasonable. libh2o is by far the most impressive effort "

"The H2O maintainers are incredibly friendly and helpful."

I scrolled half the page and still doesn't provide any useful information.

If you happen to write or own any documentation. Please don't use filler use marketing language. Please.

There are 17 sections of which 16 are technical and you complain about the “Hello and Welcome” ???

Hi Rajesh, thank you for your thoughtful critique of my documentation efforts! I took a look at the sentences that are hurting you. The first part is from H2O's mission statement, which is clearly quoted. H2O is very impressive and is seeing more and more use. The h2o maintainers are indeed very friendly and helpful. But perhaps that is because I approached them with respect and did not hate them for their mission statement? We may never know. If you have anything useful to add, the document can be edited through https://github.com/ahupowerdns/hello-libh2o

Thank you very much for replying. I will take a look at the docs & github repo more closely and provide suggestions.

h2o certainly delivers on its promise of performance. In terms of request routing and HTTP fundamentals, it's among the fastest [1]. Check out the h2o implementation of the TechEmpower Fortunes test [2] to get a feel for something slightly more complex.

[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=...

[2] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

I'm a little surprised to see it performing worse than some Go, Java, and C# webservers. I wonder why that is (presumably less optimized)? Not that it matters since the HTTP server is not going to be the bottleneck of any real application. Still, a curiosity.

How does h2o compare to Caddy? I like the ease of use of caddy.

Well, now I'm confused. I've been using this h2o server for a year now: https://h2o.examp1e.net/

Methinks there may be a naming issue here.

EDIT: So I clicked around and it looks like the same thing. Perhaps a collaboration. I need to further investigate.

libh2o is a library, h2o is a full fledged webserver using libh2o. They are both made by the same people and released together.

Having all the core features in a library allow any developer to use libh2o to easily add a webserver to their program.

note: this is explained in the first part of the link.

H2O is the same project (though this seems to be an offshoot). AFAIK its maintainer moved to Fastly some time ago.

This is literally just a text document.

Why do I see a blank page unless I enable JavaScript? :(

Answer is in the footer: http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

Those who want the text can just View Source I guess.

> Markdeep is a technology for writing plain text documents that will look good in any web browser, whether local or remote.

Funny thing is that it doesn't look good at all on my Android phone.

Because people who think it's okay to use javascript are horrible?

  body { visibility: visible; !important; }

in userContent.css fixes it, FWIW.

This is no mere text document, it's a hypertext document, with interactive features like clickable links that take you to other portions of the document! Until we invent a specialized language for hypertext, JavaScript is the best we can do.

Anyone using h2o in production and can give some insight?

I've been using h2o for about a year for several clients in my web dev business. It's fast, build for H/2, built-in security that's optional in other servers, lightweight and so on.

I was taken by surprise by this as shown in my other comment so I need to read more to see what happened here.

"libh2o is written in C"... Somewhat sad to see that in this day and age.

What is sad about using C? I'm using plenty of C programs/applicactions/tools each day which work great!

It works, there's no question about that. But it is also a language that's obviously very hard to write correct code in, considering the myriads of CVEs out there. Since we've got languages like Rust now, you don't really need to sacrifice performance for security anymore, which is why it's sad to see a project that could have "gone with the times" instead going with the old-but-tried approach.

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